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Chinese and Italian cuisines in America recall the traditions of homelands to which their practitioners can return. Not so with the Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe that inform delicatessens; those communities were destroyed in the Holocaust....

In 2004, I worked at a bar in Kansas City’s River Market district. One night, a woman handed me her credit card to pay her tab; I looked at it and said, “HAHA. Your name is Monica Ross!” She made a big, exasperated noise and drop...

Maybe the most interesting thing about Hit by Lightning is that the only two women with speaking roles have separate, faintly unplaceable European accents. Unfortunately, they never share a scene. Through an Internet dating service, Ricky...

Default has a pretty good point to make about the American media's tendency to overlay a Western worldview on the plights of impoverished people in other countries. But it sacrifices its voice to the premeditated non-style of a...

It's too easy to say that Gabe Ibáñez's Automata is less than the sum of its visuals, which a lot of people will do, because it's really pretty. The film's design evokes peak-period Jean Giraud, whose gorgeous science-fiction...

Underdog achievement stories, from Breaking Away to Rudy and Kung Fu Panda, are practically defined by the multitude of voices telling the hero that he's not good enough. Such was the real-life case of Paul Potts, the Welsh...